Racism Doesn’t Matter If Your Heart Is in the Right Place, According to Paul Ryan

You know that line people use to pardon their misogynist friend, or the one you use to excuse your racist uncle? “X might have said some offensive things, but he means well.” House Speaker Paul Ryan certainly knows that line, and he just used it to defend president Trump’s racist responses since Charlottesville.

Ryan appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday morning to discuss the current state of affairs. When host John Dickerson confronted Ryan with some of his comments from a year ago about how he wished then-candidate Trump would be inclusive, Ryan swung entirely the other way (remember, the same House speaker called Trump’s remarks on a Mexican-American federal judge “textbook racism” last year). Dickerson continued to ask Ryan how he’d rate Trump’s ability to bring this country together, to which Ryan answered, “Like I said on the Charlottesville thing . . . [there were] four comments: two good, two bad.” He concluded, “He’s learning. I know his heart is in the right place.”

Ryan then shifted his defense to Trump’s aggressive response towards the NFL players’ protests against racial injustice and police brutality. “A lot of people who are protesting on that don’t necessarily see that other people see it as disrespecting the country,” Ryan said. “What so many Americans, I see this at home, see, is you’re disrespecting this idea of America.” It might be futile to point out that Trump repeatedly protected the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, labeling some of them as “very fine people,” while calling for the removal of players who peacefully protested prior to their football match.

Granted, Paul Ryan has become a Republican poster boy for his non-confrontational approach, and one could argue that he made his position on racism known after he conceded that Trump had “messed up” his comments on Charlottesville. Yet, it is exactly his strategy of “shadowboxing,” the criticizing-without-openly-criticizing pointed out by Russell Berman in The Atlantic, that points to the distorted power dynamics at play. Ryan might not be able to afford to openly confront Trump, but for many others, there has never been a choice in the first place.